Saturday, April 5, 2008

This episode of Get Smart features night club comedian and F-Troop star Larry Storch as The Groovy Guru and has Don Adams going undercover as a hippie. I'm a big fan of all the ridiculous depictions of beatniks and hippies in old sitcoms, cop shows, and in all facets of pop culture, really.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

The Wide World of Entertainment was a weekly series on ABC that featured a different format each week, often showcasing things that no longer had a regular position on the network. Dick Cavett's nightly talk show had been cancelled earlier due to political and corporate pressure. Cavett was demoted to a monthly edition of his show that aired as part of The Wide World of Entertainment and their Wide World Specials. Here is a particularly impressive special, celebrating a quarter century of our favorite panel show here on Classic Television Showbiz, What's My Line, in nine YouTube parts.

This is footage from one of those low-budget all-Black cast road house pictures that played exclusively for Black audiences in the nineteen forties. Not sure what film it's from, however. May have been a short or may have been feature length (and feature length for these type of films was usually somewhere around fifty minutes).

Monday, March 31, 2008

Not sure which of the never ending list of old country music programs this one is from, but footage of the hillbilly that invented hip hop fashion is always worth posting. Read the crazy story of Stringbean here.

About Me

My long awaited book about comedy will be published by Grove Atlantic in 2015.
Longtime contributor to WFMU and CBC. Cited by Vanity Fair, GQ, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Onion, Salon, Slate, Atlantic Monthly, BoingBoing, Comedy Central, Dangerous Minds, WTF with Marc Maron, The New York Times, Vice etc.